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Eight percent awful—UPDATED.

An anthropology professor once told me that a quirk unique to Americans is that we generally love to take quizzes, polls and surveys. Perhaps this is true, although I never found it to be particularly true about myself: unless there is obvious potential for the results to inform or amuse me, I tend to blow right by them. The only exception is when they are political in nature: those clearly fall within the purview of the Palace’s world-renowned research program into the deadly scourge that is Conservative Personality Disorder. It would be irresponsible and unseemly of us to look away.

And so it was that I came across a Time Magazine quiz that purports to determine one’s political ideology based on answers to 12 questions about values and lifestyle. Based on work by Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU’s Stern School of Business Jonathan Haidt (who we have mentioned before and with whom we have some disagreements), the quiz outputs a score from zero to one hundred, with zero being farthest left (liberal) and one hundred being farthest right (conservative). Loyal Readers™ will no doubt understand the shock and horror I felt upon seeing my results:

That’s right, people: Your Humble Monarch® is fully 8% conservative!

Needless to say, because I understand the implications of that score probably more than any other human being on this planet, I am deeply disappointed and disgusted with myself. Among other things, this means that 8% of the time:

I am a raging racist, misogynist doucheweasel of epic proportions.

I hate poor people and blame them for their misfortune.

I want to privatize everything: prisons, healthcare, Social Security, the military.

Jeezus is telling me to run for office.

I am completely wrong, morally and factually, about everything.

It is this last point that is most troubling. If I ever think I have discovered the cure for conservatism, how can I possibly know that this isn’t one of those times (8%!) that my head is firmly planted up my ass? Worse, what if I have already discovered the cure—but wrongly discounted it for the same reason? This could set the entire research program back by years, if not decades. And that’s to say nothing of the deafening boom heard ’round the world when the Palace irony meter explodes.

I am devastated.

Wait a minute…perhaps what I am wrong about is this political quiz being all that meaningful or accurate? Mind: blown.

__________

UPDATE: Below are my results—you may not want to look at these until after you’ve taken the quiz, at this will almost certainly skew your answers. It may also leave you as baffled as I am as to exactly where that 8% figure came from.

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About Iris Vander Pluym

Iris Vander Pluym is an artist and activist in NYC (West Village), and an unapologetic, godless, feminist lefty. Raised to believe Nice Girls™ do not discuss politics, sex or religion, it turns out those are pretty much the only topics she ever wants to talk about.

FWIW, I like dogs more than cats, somewhat prefer action movies to documentaries (though this is pretty much dependent on which action movie and which documentary), and like my desk to be reasonably tidy (I don’t require right angles or anything too OCD).

Mr. Born: sounds like you just may be the vector for my 8%! Don’t come back to the Palace until you’ve had that surgery—I can’t have you spreading the plague of conservatism to the rest of my Many Tens of Loyal Readers™. :p

NomadUK: In order for our marriage to work, your/our poly partner(s) would also have to score 8% (obviously). Get back to me on that a.s.a.p.? All the best wedding venues in the city book up very quickly.

Badland: Yes, that’s exactly how it works. For your own sake, I’m not sure you should be hanging around with a blogger who is FOUR TIMES more conservative than you. But whatever you do, ferchrissakes stay away from Mr. Born. Otherwise, until I get this pestilence eradicated I’m going to have to lock up everyone in quarantine—including, apparently, myself.

YIKES! I’m 11% conservative, 89% liberal. All because these were my answers:
You like dogs more than cats
You prefer action movies to documentaries
You like a neat desk
You think self-control trumps self-expression

The dog/cat thing isn’t accurate though. I like dogs and cats equally. They didn’t have that as an option though. I also think self-expression and self-control are, more or less, equally important.

Another 8% here, because of two answers where I was mumbling “another shitty quiz without a neutral option” into my beard. And of course the “how did we do” question was totally b0rked.

I might point out that my very slight preference for self control might be related to something I saw on some other blog recently (unfortunately I don’t remember where), that about 20% of the population are just naturally more sensitive (that is, get agitated about stuff easier) … it seems I might possibly qualify, and trying to control my reactions (very consciously) is my way of coping. (As for my preference for Times Square against the Met, it’s a case of “neither really seems like I might want to go there … but an art museum sounds worse than a square that might possibly have something interesting around … still, New York is extremely low on the list of places I’d want to visit, beyond possibly looking at the skyline”.) Didn’t I say something about neutral options?

More seriously, I suspect that the 8% is actually guessing low – there are some subjects on which I know I’m fairly conservative in the original sense of that word. Language is an example – though I damn well know it evolves over time, some of those changes are almost physically painful. Or clothes – not that I look like a (political) conservative (that is, establishment-style – for example, running around in a monkey suit[*]), but I don’t like changing how I look. So long as (in my own opinion) that conservative outlook doesn’t collide with things like social justice, science, or the like, I see no reason to work against it. However, what I seem to have nothing of is any kind of RWA outlook, whatever that’s worth.

[*] Only did that while in the German Air Force around 1980 (monkey suit in various tones of blue, except for a few times with a more practical outfit in olive green), and those 18 months are enough for a lifetime, as far as I’m concerned.